Feast of Harriet Monsell of Clewer, Religious, 1883 When the eyes of the soul looking out meet the eyes read more

Feast of Harriet Monsell of Clewer, Religious, 1883 When the eyes of the soul looking out meet the eyes of God looking in, heaven has begun right here on this earth.

The smallest things become great when God requires them of us; they are small only in themselves; they are always read more

The smallest things become great when God requires them of us; they are small only in themselves; they are always great when they are done for God, and when they serve to unite us with Him eternally.

Feast of Edmund of the East Angles, Martyr, 870 Commemoration of Priscilla Lydia Sellon, a Restorer of the Religious Life read more

Feast of Edmund of the East Angles, Martyr, 870 Commemoration of Priscilla Lydia Sellon, a Restorer of the Religious Life in the Church of England, 1876 Living for others, commitment to God's redeeming purposes, is a means of grace. We give because of our faith, and it deepens as we give. If we permit ourselves and our people to give casually, we are really teaching contempt.

Feast of Harriet Monsell of Clewer, Religious, 1883 The fundamental note of the Old Testament, in other words, is read more

Feast of Harriet Monsell of Clewer, Religious, 1883 The fundamental note of the Old Testament, in other words, is revelation. Its seers and prophets are not men of philosophic mind, who have risen from the seen to the unseen and, by dint of much reflection, have gradually attained to elevated conceptions of Him who is the Author of all that is. They are men of God whom God has chosen, that He might speak to them and, through them, to His people. Israel has not, in and by them, created for itself a God: God has, through them, created for Himself a people.

Continuing a Lenten series on prayer: Every true prayer has its background and its foreground. The foreground of prayer read more

Continuing a Lenten series on prayer: Every true prayer has its background and its foreground. The foreground of prayer is the intense, immediate desire for a certain blessing which seems to be absolutely necessary for the soul to have; the background of prayer is the quiet, earnest desire that the will of God, whatever it may be, should be done. What a picture is the perfect prayer of Jesus in Gethsemane! In front burns the strong desire to escape death and to live; but behind there stands, calm and strong, the craving of the whole life for the doing of the will of God... Leave out the foreground, let there be no expression of the will of him who prays, and there is left a pure submission which is almost fatalism. Leave out the background, let there be no acceptance of the will of God, and the prayer is only an expression of self-will, a petulant claiming of the uncorrected choice of him who prays. Only when the two are there together, the special desire resting on the universal submission, the universal submission opening into the special desire, is the picture perfect and the prayer complete.

Trinity Sunday I vehemently dissent from those who would not have private persons read the Holy Scriptures, nor read more

Trinity Sunday I vehemently dissent from those who would not have private persons read the Holy Scriptures, nor have them translated into the vulgar tongues. I would wish that all women -- girls even -- would read the Gospels and the letters of Paul. I wish that they were translated into all languages of all people. To make them understood is surely the first step. It may be that they might be ridiculed by many, but some would take them to heart. I long that the husbandman should sing portions of them to himself as he follows the plough, that the weaver should hum them to the tune of his shuttle, that the traveller should beguile with their stories the tedium of his journey.

He who loveth God with all his heart feareth not death, nor punishment, nor judgment, nor hell, because perfect love read more

He who loveth God with all his heart feareth not death, nor punishment, nor judgment, nor hell, because perfect love giveth sure access to God. But he who still delighteth in sin, no marvel if he is afraid of death and judgment.

Commemoration of Cecile Isherwood, Founder of the Community of the Resurrection, Grahamstown, South Africa, 1906 The Church has no read more

Commemoration of Cecile Isherwood, Founder of the Community of the Resurrection, Grahamstown, South Africa, 1906 The Church has no mission of its own. All we can have by ourselves is a club or a debating society; and our only hope, left to ourselves, is to win as many members for our own club and away from other clubs as we can. And whatever this is, it is not Mission. Mission belongs to God. The Mission was His from the beginning; it is His; it will always be His. He has His purposes from the foundation of the world, and the means to fulfill them; and the only part the Church has in this is obedience -- a share in the eternal and life-giving obedience of the Son of God... And the most terrible judgment on the Church comes when God leaves us to our own devices because He is tired of waiting for our obedience -- leaves us to be the domestic chaplains to a comfortable secular world -- and goes Himself into the wilderness of human need and injustice and pain. This judgment does come on churches and nations, when they forget that God is in command, that He does the choosing.

What I am concerned with here is not to write a new life of Jesus, but to set down my read more

What I am concerned with here is not to write a new life of Jesus, but to set down my witness to the continued shocks which his words and deeds gave me as I approached the Gospels uninsulated by the familiar cover of beautiful language. The figure who emerged is quite unlike the Jesus of conventional piety, and even more unlike that imagined hero whom members of various causes claim as their champion. What we are so often confronted with today is a "processed" Jesus. Every element that we feel is not consonant with our "image" of him is removed, and the result is more insipid and unsatisfying than the worst of processed food.